11555 Realtors and the Art of Selling a House

Nielo's funny list on the Art of House dressing led me to some observations we had when going about with several realtors on house viewing trips in several parts of Italy:

1. Be sure to take client to house you have never seen before.

2. Make sure you take client who is following you through a very narrow walled street.
Be certain that another car is parked along the lane inside, facing the wrong way. This
will ensure that client scrapes their rented vehicle on the large stones that jut out of the
wall.

2. Ensure that there are no keys to the house and that the owner is nowhere to be found.
Then, if you do contact the owner, spend 1/2 hour with them on the phone arguing
while client is standing there.

3. Make sure that the owner is home and following you and your clients throughout the
house.

4. Summon up all of the dead flies you can find and sprinkle them about.

5. Add mouse droppings for good measure.

6. Did you remember a handful of mosquitoes buzzing overhead as well?

6. Agent - make sure your breath is so bad that child of clients must trick you into
accepting some chewing gum.

7. Take the client to the most remote homes you can find, especially when you are told
that the client wants to be within 5 minutes driving distance from the nearest village.

8. Bring the client to a house that needs to be gutted when they have specifically asked
for a home that is "habitable"

9. Make sure that a high tension electric tower is near the property especially when client
has requested that none be in the area.

10. Argue with client that all of the mold they are seeing in the kitchen and bedrooms on
the house newly renovated is really nothing. When they insist that you or your
assistant follow-up, notify client that is it a small matter that can be fixed for about
80,000 euros at the buyer's expense. Be sure to mention that current owner will not
budge on the price.

11. Tell client who brings back their friend who is a mason and finds problems that the
mason is just out to make trouble. Those cracks and mold on the outside bottom of
the house are really not a problem - nor is the big hill across the road from the house
which the mason mentions would prevent sunlight from reaching it until noon.

Category
Circolo di Conversazione

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 01/28/2009 - 13:37

I'm sure that just about everyone who looks for a property in Italy will have horror stories to tell about agents, just as I'm sure agents have no problems remembering clients from hell.

Several years ago, my late wife and I paid for a day-long introductory tour of Abruzzo by one of the most high-profile Pescara-based agencies in the region.

The morning was spent with a young woman who refused to go into one derelict property because she was certain there were bats roosting there and who ran screaming from another when a rat wandered casually across the living room floor as we walked in. She also drove us between properties with a typically casual Italian indifference to traffic and road because of maintaining lots of eye-contact with us while chattering away.

At lunch (part of the package we paid for) she spent the whole time (about 1½ hours) talking in Italian – which she knew we did not speak – to the local scout we had met up with for the last property before we went off to eat in the airless, deserted restaurant. At the end of the meal, she deigned to speak to us only long enough to inform us that she had an appointment at the office in Pescara, so we would be shown more properties by someone else.

This turned out to be a middle-aged guy who clearly considered himself a lovable rogue type. He had been given no advance information about the sort of places we were interested in and spoke only to me for the five hours we were together, totally ignoring my late wife. He also treated the drive as an opportunity to stop at a few places and ask the occupants if nearby properties might be for sale. At the end of the day, he gave me his personal business card and suggested I contact him directly – rather than the agency – when we were in a position to seriously look at properties.

I didn't go back to that agency when I was able to proceed with buying a house.

However, I did have a peculiar sense of [I]déjà vu[/I] a couple years later during a day with an Amandola-based agency which has a particularly slick website.

This agent completely ignored my list of requirements, showed me only ruins at the upper end of my budget and tried to convince me that the restoration work required would cost a pittance. Even though I had arranged the appointment weeks in advance, at midday I was abruptly told that the agent had to return to Amandola for the afternoon along with the young assistant who had been acting as translator because they needed to be at the Final Act for a property, so I would be spending the afternoon with one of her scouts.

He turned out to speak no English whatsoever. His driving skills were on par with the Pescara-based agent I had encountered months before and I ended up getting cramp in my arm from clutching the door handle so tightly. As had happened with the other agency, he had no idea of what I was looking for and showed me completely inappropriate properties. When I had said my unexpected goodbye to the main Agent, I told her that i would be willing to stay another night in the hotel so she could show me other properties the following day if she wanted. I received no call that night, so I returned to Abruzzo the following day.

Two weeks later, I received an email from the assistant asking if I had seen anything I was interested in while with the scout. I responded by telling her that I thought the Agent had behaved in an unprofessional way and that she had made it very clear to me that she thought I was a time-waster rather than – as I had told her I was – someone with money in the bank who was ready to make an immediate purchase if shown the right property. I also told her that I had already signed a [I]proposta[/I] for a property in Abruzzo.

She replied saying that she and the Agent were glad I would be living far away from them.

On the other hand, when I started looking at properties in Abruzzo, the first two were very definitely [I]not[/I] what I was looking for, but the third is the one I live in now.

Al

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 01/29/2009 - 04:56

I experienced all of the above when house hunting and then I worked for an Italian estate agency and saw it from another point of view.......

[B]Tips for the house hunter:[/B]

1. Make sure you make an appointment for a Sunday/Bank Holiday when the agent would like to spend some time with their family and all the owners of the houses you'd like to see are away or at the beach because it is a Sunday/Bank Holiday.

2. Always give the agent your mobile number and then leave said mobile at home in the UK. This is especially effective if you also don't reply to any emails. It adds to the general air of anticipation, wondering if you are actually going to turn up.

3. Agree to meet at 10am and then make sure you turn up at least 45 minutes late, thus ensuring that we miss every owner at every house all day resulting in said 1/2 hour phonecall trying to persuade the owner to come back again.This is especially effective if you have followed the advice in point 2.

4. When specifying what kind of property you would like, make sure you say the following: "I want a habitable house but it's OK to do a little work, with a little land but not too much, near a village with shops but not in a town, no pylons but with electricity, no neighbours but not isolated, no farm sheds/machinery/farm smells etc but in the country, oh and make sure it has a view"

5. Then make sure you don't specify a budget (after all the agent might then make every house's price exactly the same as the figure you mention) so we have to guess how much you want to spend. Or (my personal favourite) specify your budget in an email without any currency symbols so we don't know if you're talking Japanese Yen or US Dollars.

6. Make sure you arrange to see a property you have seen on our website with every agent (who are also listing it on their websites) just to keep us honest and ensure we are not entitled to any commission.

Finally, when we bump into you a few months later, tell us excitedly how you found and bought the perfect property. "It is in a town with a balcony and wonderful neighbours." You say. "Just what we were looking for".